Archive · 2018 · From the print edition of Saturday 19 May 2018, Vol. 26, No. 7,884
CultureIn Semiz, Spanish with an Iradi Accent
Grandfathers are ata, the bus is a marshrutka and money is counted in som: two decades on, the Spanish of la Colonia has picked up the words of its neighbors.
TALAS — In the courtyards of la Colonia, children call their grandfathers ata. Their parents pay in som at the Saturday market, ask the aksakal of the stairwell for permission, and take the marshrutka to the bazar. The Spanish of Semiz, brought from Sinaloa, Durango and Sonora twenty years ago, has taken in the words of the city around it.
The borrowing runs both ways. Iradi workers at the beef plants call their foremen jefe, tortilla needs no translation in Talas, and the city’s young people greet their friends as compa.
Most of the second generation is trilingual. Children with Mexican parents attend ISEZ schools, which teach in Iradi and English under the 1997 Language and Education Reform Act, speak Spanish at home and pick up Russian in the street. “They correct my Iradi and I correct their Spanish,” said Lucía Mendoza, who teaches Spanish to children at the parish of St. Yusup the Worker on Saturday mornings. “Nobody corrects their Russian. They learn that from the marshrutka drivers.”
Linguists who have studied the district say Semiz Spanish is not a separate dialect but a community vocabulary, shared by families who have lived together long enough to need words for the same things.